Shuttle XPC SZ170R8 V2: Small but Powerful

Compact, efficient and incredibly powerful if you spring for the right parts, the Shuttle XPS SZ170R8 V2 has a lot going for it. The small form factor of the motherboard does not take away from its power. Even better is its capability as a portable machine.

SGCafe.com

Student Council Presidents are usually those student leaders who are well-organized and have natural leadership skills. There are a lot of anime characters who have the traits to become an excellent Student Council President, so Charapedia asked which characters would make the best one. 10,000 people (46.2% male, 53.7% female) all voted for a total of...

About VR-Zone

If you're interested in what Intel has up it sleeves for the next eight months or so, then you'll be interested in reading this, as the models names of Intel's future chipsets for its Ivy Bridge platform set to launch early next year has tipped up alongside new details of Intel's new LGA-2011 Sandy Bridge-E processors. Not all of the news are good news though, as it looks like Intel has decided to continue to lock out overclockers.

If you're interested in what Intel has up it sleeves for the next eight months or so, then you'll be interested in reading this, as the models names of Intel's future chipsets for its Ivy Bridge platform set to launch early next year has tipped up alongside new details of Intel's new LGA-2011 Sandy Bridge-E processors. Not all of the news are good news though, as it looks like Intel has decided to continue to lock out overclockers.

Let's start with the Ivy Bridge chipsets, which according to the latest roadmap leaks will be called the Z77, Z75 and H77 as far as Intel's consumer platform is concerned, although this only covers the performance and mainstream sections so we might end up with a H61 replacement at some stage as well. On the business end of things we're looking at the Q77, Q75 and B75.

Interestingly it looks like Intel has decided to give up on its graphics free P series of chipsets and replace it with two Z SKUs. We're not certain what the difference between the Z75 and Z77 will be, although presumably the H77 will no feature any kind of overclocking support, much like the current H67 chipset. There are no apparent feature differences from what we can see based on the Panther Point chipset details that Intel has revealed so far, unless Intel decides to limit the USB 3.0 port support on some chipsets, but this doesn't make much sense. It's possible that we'll see some kind of CPU feature limitation if you go with a more basic chipset, but we're just going to have to wait and see what Intel comes up with in future roadmaps.

As for the Sandy Bridge-E processors which are set to arrive sometime in Q4, unless Intel has a change of heart when AMD launches Bulldozer, things just got a lot more interesting. The first CPU specs are out and the disappointing news here is that the quad core CPUs are as Intel puts it “limited unlocked” so in other words, it looks like bus speed overclocking might very well be a dream of the past. The six core CPUs are fully unlocked and the only slight light in the darkness here is the fact that not all LGA-2011 CPUs will be XE models.

In fact, Intel seems to have quite a wide spread of CPUs, although the most basic quad core Sandy Bridge-E CPU will be positioned to replace the Core i7 960 and will sit just above the Core i7 2600K in Intel's line-up. The quad cores will start at 3.6GHz and features 10MB of L3 cache whereas the six core CPUs start at 3.2GHz with 12MB L3 cache. The initial XE version will be clocked at 3.3GHz and sport 15MB L3 cache which looks like a decent step up from the current Core i7 990X.

We have a feeling that if Intel has in fact removed bus speed overclocking the company has killed competitive overclocking competitions in one fell swoop and this is not only bad news for the overclocking community, but also for the motherboard manufacturers. In the latter case a lot of money and effort is being put into creating overclockable products, especially at the high-end, as this helps drive sales of lower-end models thanks to the halo effect. Now the hope really lies with AMD and that the company can offer something really competitive to take on Intel, least not for Intel to change its current, very silly strategy of removing all the overclocking features many of us have become used to so they can charge us extra for specific CPU SKUs that still features very limited overclocking potential.